Book 1, Page 191

Please, someone zoom in to appreciate the era-appropriate buffalo head nickel and mercury dimes that are hinted at in panel 1! Barry thoughtfully looked up the cost of beer in 1941 (about 28 cents) and wrote "one of Lillian’s hands, putting two quarters and a dime on the bar" in the script. Then I got excited about drawing the two discontinued coin designs that I knew about off the top of my head and totally ignored Barry's helpful and informative script. Oops.

Panel 2 was made possible by two bottles of Pelican Brewing Double IPA and a phone camera. I could not have figured out which fingers went where without scooping up the bottles in-person and getting a photo.

Don't tell anyone, but Barry actually drew Babe's left arm and hand in panel 3. In my initial digital drawings, Babe's arm was completely straight and coming out of Babe's shoulder in an awkward way. After Barry made a couple of suggestions over gChat, I asked him to just draw what he meant in the shared file. It looked a lot better, so I traced over that to get to the final version.

In this scene, Ruth, Mona, and Kansas all have new outfits. Sometimes I'll draw them wearing the same dress in several different scenes. (This is before fast fashion and what are they, a Rockefeller?) But Mona's dresses have been through 2 bar raids and anyway, I wanted to show that some time had passed. I thought about what would be in character but different from the previous things they all wore.

It's daytime, so Mona isn't wearing an evening gown, but her dress is still long and shiny. She's either jujjed up the pillbox hat from the previous scene at Mona's 440 or she owns a few of those.

OH HEY, I just looked up "jujj" (zhuzh? jeuje?) to make sure the phrase doesn't have some wildly problematic origin, and Merriam-Webster says:

The word has its origin in Polari, a kind of slang used in the British underground performing arts as well as the gay subculture; the OED cites use (with the spelling zhoosh) that dates to 1977."

So that's fun.

Ruth has a new hat and jacket inspired by this look from the Early 1940s Sears Catalog collection:

These are definitely from the women's section of the store, but they're more masculine-coded than the teenage-girl dresses we've seen her in so far.

Kansas has been wearing plaid or florals every time we've seen her, so I chose a dark striped dress from the catalog as a post-breakup "new look, new you" outfit. It still has her trademark Peter Pan collar, though.

Fun page trivia: Barry assures me that this cigarette ad on the radio is 100% real.

Thanks, as always! I hope you enjoyed the mini-dives.